“But here tonight, he called Sarkon his lord.”

“Sarkon is his lord—he is the lord of all dragons. And every monster has the power of masquerade. Sarkon himself loves the masque and now he plays the role of mountain god. The first time we met he was a piper who played an evil song to drive me mad.”

“He was a piper then?”

“No more a piper than a mountain god. He is his cloak, whatever garment suits his evil purpose.”

“And what is his purpose?”

“To smash the world the Father-Spirit made and loves. He gloried in the Singer’s death and hates the very thought that the Invader is the lover of all men. He told you that there were no gods?”

“Yes.”

“He tells others that there are, but he tells no one that Earthmaker is the Father of the Troubadour.”

“I dreamed in my delirium of dragons bold and singers in the street. Tell me of the song,” said Everyman.

So Anthem sang in starlight the Singer’s story and when he came to the Singer’s cosmic moments in the great machine, they both fell on their knees.

“What must I do to be unchained?” cried Everyman.

“Cry out your blindness and open to the Wind.”

And Everyman wept into the night and sobbed his guilt: “Earthmaker, I regret that your Beloved died. I put away false scholarship and pride. Come, Great Invader! Move inside!”

Once more the radiance grew from the stars till the Invader had buried them in gusty hurricanes of brilliance.

And Everyman rejoiced to know the living Singer who had smashed the fetters of his intellect and let his desperation out of hiding.

“I am unchained!” he almost shouted.

“You are indeed!” said Anthem.

“May I have the Stigmon?”

So in the raging light storm of Invader’s power Anthem drew a handful of the new earth. He traced the Singer’s Sign in the fiery luminescence of Invader:

“It is only out of Terra’s shame

That men of Terra wear the name

Of Singer,

Prince of Planets,

Troubadour of Life …

Earthmaker, Singer and Invader be

The substance of infinity.”

Everyman surveyed the clot of earth he held and rejoiced to see the stain that symbolized the crushing pain of the machine.

He stared into the glinting radiance and repeated through half-opened lips:

“O man of Terra, fully know

There is no depth he would not go

To love.”

XV

Yes, it was savage for the rifleman to ask the weeping mother which of her sons she would like to have shot first. But the greater cruelty is to ask the frightened child which of his parents he would least prefer to live.

In the days that followed Everyman and Anthem became brothers in the spirit. Everyman’s deep resonance soon made singing in the streets an eloquent affair. Daily, as he finished the Song, men and women, crying out to be unchained, received the Stigmon. Everyman offered it in the mystic magnetism of his melody: